The inofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:	535
Affecting Squeeze:	419
Squeeze only:	58
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	361

Of these 361 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	18
Patched in Squeeze:	55
Duplicates in Squeeze:	50
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	8
Claimed in Squeeze:	2
Delayed in Squeeze:	6
Can fixed in a security Update:	31
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	38

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 195 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, the with the view of the Release Managers, 337 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

Have you already started to try out these new storage/database things commonly referred to as NoSQL? (For you google-bot, I'm talking about CouchDB, Cassandra, HBase, Hadoop, Hypertable, MongoDB, Tokyo Cabinet, etc). Well, it's one thing to install and use them but another to understand all the computer science background about them.
Therefor many developers around the world thought to make this summer a NoSQL summer. Local meetings are held in many cities: London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, lake constance ...
If you like to meet for a beer and learn and discuss about some of the hottest stuff in computing, then come around! Please select the dates when you can join and the papers you'd like to discuss. You can subscribe to email announcements or ical and rss feeds at the lake constance nosql summer page.

While customizing Emacs this last weeks, I had the need to customize also the color theme. Color themes are always a pain in the ass to edit, because you're supposed to read color strings like #aabbcc and guess what colors they represent. This is why I wrote rainbow-mode, a minor mode for Emacs that will highlight strings that represents color, using the color they represent. This support hexadecimal syntax, HTML color name, X color names and rgb() CSS syntax.

Just going on how they treat matters regarding the internet, it seems that the current Australian government is trying to beat the previous government's poor record. Where the previous government seemed to think the internet a scary and unimportant thing that they didn't really understand and therefore ignored it, the current government seems to be trying to do something, but like a lot of other things they do, do something badly.

Internet Filtering
One of their bright ideas is to censor the internet, by putting some rather large filters right in the middle of all the ISPs. Supposedly this is going to protect the children, though other than some mad ranting by Senator Conroy he hasn't said which children or how.

The clearest information is that it will block Refused Content or RC rated information. The problem with this is there is no clear definition what this is. With no clear boundary you can get what is "scope creep". Bit by bit, each group with their own agenda will try to get whatever they don't like banned. Some will fail, but others will get their little set of demons onto the list.

From "children overboard" to the strange siezure of the wikileaks founder's passport when he returned to Australia, you can never trust the government fully. As the filter list will be a closed list, who is to say if it is right a particular webpage or website should be banned? Books or films that are banned are known, you can find out what they are and why. A proper discussion and review can then be undertaken. By contrast, you won't even know something is banned unless you try to visit it.

I've personally seen the "great firewall of china". What is filtered is often arbitary, though anything that is embarassing to the government is filtered. It slows a lot of sites down and makes others look strange. Do you really what to live in a country where the government decides what ideas should be seen? Or even a country that places like China can point to and say they are doing the same thing, so its all ok?

Data Retention
The next bright idea by the government is to make ISPs keep 10 years of internet browsing history of all their users. This would be like tapping everyone's phone, just in case you did something wrong in the next 10 years.

There hasn't been much detail about this proposal but let's assume for a moment that it keeps URLs. Now of course most people's internet addresses move around, so you will also need to keep some sort of log of which account used what address for the same time.

The URLs will tell the government which websites you have visited, but URLs also tell them which pages you visited. You can also often assume which pages you read and which you didn't because of the time between this viewed page and the next.

Search engine queries are also encoded into a url. Google searches usually have something at the end of the url which is what you were searching for. There is also a chain of visited pages, so someone looking at a log could see your search, you go to a site, perhaps you then visit a banking or paypal site (have you bought something now?)

Even if you think you have nothing to worry about what the government might do with this information, including future governments, this information has to sit somewhere. Data sitting around for 10 years has 10 years time of being stolen or copied. Perhaps some activists obtain this log and publish a list of names of people who visited a particular website.

There is current laws for lawful interception. This is where the police or another security agency goes to the court and says a particular person has done certain bad things and asks if they can intercept their internet traffic. It's the same rules if they want to tap your phone. Except for "fishing trips" where police just randomly look at information from anyone hoping to trip up on something, what is this system going to be used for?

What can you do?
If you're not happy about either, or both, of these new proposals, it is time to do something about it. Visit the website Open Internet Website for what you can do. One of the things is to

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• Censorship Down Under (spectrum.ieee.org)
• China Says Will Keep Blocking Online Content (abcnews.go.com)
• Australian Censorship Minister Claims People Under Attack From "Spams Through The Portal" (inquisitr.com)
• Australian Gov't Seeks To Record Citizens' Web Histories (yro.slashdot.org)

I'm still wading through my backlog of LWN articles, but I found this one to be of interest. From my interpretation of the article, I/O intensive workloads currently cause the ondemand governor to drop the CPU frequency, whereas it ideally shouldn't. It looks like the fixes have been merged into what will become 2.6.35

It s widely regarded that passwords should be changed regularly. The Australian government declared last week the National Cyber Security Awareness Week [1] and has published a list of tips for online security which includes Get a stronger password and change it at least twice a year . Can a Password be Semi-Public? Generally I think of a password as being either secret or broken. If a password is known to someone other than the sysadmin and the user who is authorised to use the account in question then you have potentially already lost all your secret data. If a password is disclosed to an unauthorised person on one occasion then merely changing the password is not going to do any good unless the root cause is addressed, otherwise another anothorised person will probably get the password at some future time. Hitachi has published a good document covering many issues related to password management [2]. I think it does a reasonable job of making sysadmins aware of some of the issues but there are some things I disagree with. I think it should be used as a list of issues to consider rather than a list of answers. The Hitachi document lists a number of ways that passwords may be compromised and suggests changing them every 60 to 90 days to limit the use of stolen passwords. This seems to imply that a password is something that s value slowly degrades over time as it s increasingly exposed. I think that the right thing to do is to change a password if you suspect that it has been compromised. There s not much benefit in having a password if it s going to be known by unauthorised people for 89 days before being changed! Fundamentally a password is something that can have it s value rapidly drop to zero without warning. It doesn t wear out. Why are terms such as Three Months used for Maximum Password Ages? The Hitachi document gives some calculations on the probability of a brute-force attack succeeding against a random password with 90 days of attacking at a rate of 100 attempts per second [2]. I think that if a service is run by someone who wouldn t notice the load of 100 attempts per second then you have bigger security problems than the possibility of passwords being subject to brute-force attacks. Also it s not uncommon to have policies to lock accounts after as few as three failed login attempts. Rumor has it that in the early days of computing when the hashed password data was world readable someone calculated that more than 3 months of CPU time on a big computer would be needed to obtain a password by brute-force. But since then the power of individual CPUs has increased dramatically, computers have become cheap enough that anyone can easily gain legal access to dozens of systems and illegal access to a million systems, and it has become a design feature in every OS that hashed passwords are not readable by general users. So the limiting factor is to what degree the server restricts the frequency of password guesses. I don t think that specifying the minimum password length and maximum password age based on the fraction of the key space that could be subject to a brute-force attack makes sense. I don t think that any attempt to make an industry-wide standard for the frequency of password changes (as the government is trying to do) makes sense. Can there be a Delay between a Password being Compromised and being Used by an Attacker? Hypothetically speaking, if a password was likely to be compromised (EG by having the paper it was written on lost or stored insecurely) for some time before an attacker exploited it, then if the password was changed during that time period it could solve the problem. For example when a company moves office there is the possibility of notepaper with passwords to be lost. So if the sysadmin caused every user password to expire at the time of the move then a hostile party would be unable to gain access. Another possibility is the theft of backup tapes that contain the list of unencrypted passwords. If users change their passwords every three months then the theft of some four month old backup tapes will be less of a problem. Another possibility concerns the resale of old computers, phones, and other devices that may contain passwords. A reasonably intelligent user won t sell their old hardware as soon as the replacement device arrives, they will want to use the new device for some time to ensure that it works correctly. If passwords expire during this trial period with the new device then passwords stored in the old device won t have any value. The down-side to this idea is that people probably sell their old gear fairly quickly and making passwords expire every two weeks would not be accepted well by the users. It seems to me that having bulk password changes (all passwords for one user or for one company) based on circumstances that lead to potential insecurity would do more good than changing passwords at a fixed schedule. How are Passwords typically Compromised? Dinei Flor ncio and Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research and Baris Coskun of Brooklyn Polytechnic University wrote a paper titled Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything? [3] which discusses this issue. The first thing that they note is that nowadays passwords are most commonly compromised by phishing and keylogging. In those cases passwords are typically used shortly after they are stolen and the strength of a password never does any good. That paper suggests that banks should use stronger user-names rather than stronger passwords to combat the threat of bulk brute-force attacks. Can a Password Last Forever? If a password is entered in a secure manner, authenticated by a secure server, and all network links are encrypted or physically protected then there should never be a need to change it. Of course nothing is perfectly secure, so for some things with minimal short-term value or which can be used without anyone noticing there is a benefit in changing the password. But in the case of Internet banking if a hostile party gets your login details then you will probably know about it in a few days when the bank calls you about the unusual transactions from foreign countries long before a 90 day password change schedule would have done any good. Maybe one of the issues determining whether a password should be changed regularly is whether an attacker could use long-term read-only access to gain some benefit. Being able to read all the email someone received for a year could be a significant benefit if that person was a public figure, and there s usually no way for an ISP customer to know that someone else is downloading all their mail via POP or IMAP. Should a Password be the only Authentication Method? It is generally agreed that an authenitcation method should ideally involve something you have plus something you know. That means a password and a physical device such as a smart card, token with a changing sequential password, or a key such as a Yubikey [4]. If the physical device can t be cloned (through some combination of technical difficulty and physical access control) then it significantly improves security. When a physical device is used the purpose of the password is merely to stop someone who steals the physical device from being immediately exploit everything the password only has to be strong enough to keep the accounts secure until a new token can be issued. The combination of something you have and something you know is very strong. Having a physical token stored on the desk next to the PC that is used for logging in provides a significant benefit, then an attacker needs to break in to the house and can t sniff the password by compromising the PC remotely. Conclusion In all aspects of security you need to consider what threats you face. If an attacker is likely to launch an immediate noisy attack (such as transferring the maximum funds out of an Internet banking account) then changing the password regularly won t do any good. If a subtle long-term attack is expected then changing the password can do a lot of good but a physical token is the ideal if the account is valuable enough. But to put things in to perspective, it s technically possible to use a mobile phone camera at close range (or a SLR with a big lens at long range) to take a photo of keys that allow reproducing them. But this hasn t stopped people from carrying their house keys in an obvious manner that permits photography or leaving them on their desk at work. Also I ve never heard of anyone routinely changing the door locks in case a hostile party might have got a key although I m sure that such practices are common in highly secure locations. Few people even take their house keys off the key-ring when they have their car serviced! Related Posts Defense in Depth and Sudo when using sudo can increase security and when it can t.
Logging Shell Commands how to log what the sysadmin does and what benefits that provides you, it doesn t help if the sysadmin is hostile.
Logging in as Root should you login directly as root?

• [1] http://www.staysmartonline.gov.au/news/news_articles/feature/national_cyber_security_awareness_week
• [2] http://psynch.com/docs/password-management-best-practices.html
• [3] http://www.usenix.org/event/hotsec07/tech/full_papers/florencio/florencio.pdf
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/03/15/yubikey/

I have been recently approached by several friends, from different countries. Mexico and the violence seems to be a frequent news topic all over the world. I live in Mexico City, as ~25% of the country's population does. This is not an easy city, of course, and I won't deny it has tons of problems of its own. However, Mexico City (and even more so the approximately of it that is politically located in Distrito Federal, the formal country capital) is very lucky in this regard. Still, in most of the country, the violence is mostly in the news, mostly a worrying perception that is every day more insistent. My parents live in Cuernavaca, Morelos, ~80Km south from us. Morelos has been known for decades for being the druglords' getaway and safe haven, so it remained a mostly peaceful state for most of this time. This has changed, and at some points during this year, militarization feels quite creepy... Fortunately, just for a couple of weeks, and then back to what seems like normal. The real problems in Morelos is the undeniable corruption of its successive governments, the lack of regard for the population, the inexistent urban planning... However, I know from several friends living in the North of the country (and all along the very long border - The most drug-related violent states nowadays are Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Le n, with only two states in the South Michoac n and Guerrero) that violence is really felt by local population on the streets. Some friends say they have grown used to hearing shootings (Durango), others say that it is now usual that the cartels openly strangle the city's vial system with the express purpose of showing off their strength (Monterrey, Nuevo Le n, one of Mexico's most important cities and taken in the past as a token of industrialization and first-world-like life conditions... Just don't look towards the poor areas). About Chihuahua, I'd rather not even talk, as by all accounts (official even) it rivals Iraq in the lack of control the government has of its territory. Still, with all that as background... I am afraid of what I read today in the news. I know a single declaration is not enough to worry about (as said in El Quijote, una golondrina sola no hace verano , a single swallow does not mean it's summer), but those things always start small... Until they explode. La Jornada reports that The retired general Luis Garfias Maga a recommends suspending constitutional guarantees in the country to be able to properly fight violence. The last century we had a sad and long history of cases where the military took over civilian power and suspended the constitutional rights in basically every nation in Latin America Except for Mexico. Not one of those cases was overall successful. Not one of them went by without raging abuses, without terrible consequences. I don't see imminent we will go over to a military rule nor anything close to it, but the environment is getting each time closer to how it was like before said rights suspension. We should learn that it is just not the way, it leads nowhere. I am convinced, and will keep insisting on it at every ocassion, that the only possible way to fight violence is by reducing the social distance, and that should be achieved most importantly by reducing poverty, but also by making it harder to become incredibly rich. Mexico's percentage of poor people has grown over the last decades, but at the same time, the amount of wealth concentrated in very few hands has grown much faster. A society with terribly rich and terribly poor people leads to hatred, leads to desperation, leads to violence. A flatter society, even if the overall standard was to be somewhat lower, tends to a better equilibrium. And yes, I know the original problem with drugs is that Mexico is a great transit area for drugs to reach the USA (and I could also rant about drug legalization I won't, it's late and I must go to work), but the main fuel for young people to leave everything behind and take the risk of starting a life of open ilegality is the lack of future they face all life long. That leads many to risk their lives attempting to cross the border to the USA (Mexico "exports" 500,000 people every year), but also lures them to jobs where they will have easy money... In exchange for their lifes, ultimately. Anyway... Just to repeat and round off: The answer to this problem is not repression, is not policial or military strength. Our only way out is through social justice.

People s the deadline is fast approaching. Don t worry though, the best ideas come under deadlines and your proposal need not be lengthy. So get those typing hands out and submit a proposal (a few sentences suffices) for a presentation!
The annual Debian conference is being held in NYC this year. First time
setting foot in the imperial empire. Are you doing something related to
free software that might be interesting to share, show off or talk about
at Debconf? I bet you are! We are looking for art installations,
performances, movie screenings, maybe you are wanting to host a
roundtable/panel discussion, coordinate a workshop (you dont have to
know the subject deeply to do this!). I know the deadline is soon, but don t let that scare you. The
submission requirement bar is very low, and we are flexible! here is the submission information: [1] ********************* Calling all potential contributors to DebConf10! One more week until
the final submission deadline! The DebConf team is excited to announce that we are now accepting
proposals for contributions to this year s Debian conference! We
invite you to submit proposals for how you would contribute until the
deadline: soon There are many ways you can contribute, you could present a technical
paper, host a panel discussion, put on a tutorial, do a performance,
an art installation, a debate, host a meeting (BoFS, or Birds of a
Feather Session), or other possibilities that you devise. This year we
are also accepting proposals for tracks=E2=80=94a thematic grouping around a
particular subject, and people to coordinate those tracks. If you are
looking for ideas of things that you could contribute, or have ideas
for things that you would like to see happen at DebConf, have a look
at the Contribution Brainstorm[0] page. DebConf talks will be broadcast live on the Internet where possible,
unless otherwise requested. Videos of the talks will be published on
the web along with the presentation slides and papers. =3D=3D Step 1. Submit Proposal =3D=3D Proposals should provide an overview of your proposed contribution,
similar to an abstract, and be no more than 600 words. Since
contributions can cover a range of issues, please describe what your
proposal covers, be it political (Free Software, law, advocacy,
access, etc.), technical (d-i, OpenPGP, etc.), social (Debian
structures and groups). It s okay to hit all three of these. Your
proposal should also include some information on why you re qualified
to present, or coordinate this topic. For example, you can include
links to posts you have made to Debian mailing lists or other material
that indicates your qualifications. Proposals and their abstracts will
be accepted until May 1st, 2010, 23h59 UTC. To submit your proposal, go to Penta[1] and register as an
attendee. Once you are registered, there is a Submit a proposal
link. You will see your proposal on the site. You can choose between
different presentation types. If you are unsure what type you should
use, please read our glossary of definitions[2]. If it s not there for
some reason, or you have questions, please contact us immediately at
mailto:talks@debconf.org. =3D=3D Step 2. Committee Review =3D=3D The review committee for this year will make its decision by May 1st,
2010. All correspondence will be done by email. =3D=3D Step 3. Paper Submission =3D=3D Like last year, we are asking for papers to be submitted along with
the presentations. A full paper is optional, however we strongly
encourage you to submit one if possible as we intend to provide
written information along with transcripts of the sessions for later
viewing. Having written papers in advance will allow us to get
translations done to help non-native-English speakers feel more
comfortable with the topics presented. Papers are due by July 1st,
2010, and should cover the topic in reasonable depth (3 pages A4 text,
plus pictures and diagrams). We will use LaTeX to typeset the
proceedings. Please submit your paper formatted in LaTeX. Should you
be unfamiliar with LaTeX earlier submission in plain text is also
fine. =3D=3D Step 4. Live Presentation =3D=3D Longer presentations may have a break in the middle and should include
workshop items that directly involve the participants. If using slides
or any other presentation, please consider that your audience will
consist of people who use free software, and your choice of
application to prepare and display the slides should reflect this if
at all possible. =3D=3D Fine Print Publication Rights =3D=3D DebConf requires non-exclusive publication rights to papers,
presentations, and any additional handouts or audio/visual materials
used in conjunction with the presentation. The authors have the
freedom to pick a DFSG-free license for the papers themselves and
retain all copyrights. The presentations will be recorded, and may be
broadcast over the Internet. Any copies of the presentation will be
made available =3D=3D Failure to Submit =3D=3D In the event that a deadline is missed we reserve the right to revoke
any offer to present. =3D=3D About DebConf =3D=3D The annual DebConf conference is a technical and social forum for
Debian developers, sponsors, affiliates, and friends. It allows
various groups within Debian a chance to come together, network, and
share their work. Until we see you in the big city,
DebConf Talks Team [1] introduction written by Micah Anderson

Friday I took the day off for us to go camping. Due to the birth of Oliver, our last time camping was in 2008. Back then, Terah had asked me what I wanted for father s day, and I suggested camping. Except when she was pregnant last year (and then Oliver was little), we have sort of had a standing plan to go camping twice a year: around father s day and my birthday. She says that s way more camping in a year than anyone needs. Anyhow, Jacob doesn t remember the last time we went camping; he was not quite 2 at the time. I explained that we would sleep in tents, and he d get one just his size. He laughed at that. Then I explained that he would get a bag to sleep in, and he thought that was hilarious. He kept talking about tents and even more so about sleeping bags until he actually got to be in one. It seems like each time we go camping, we wind up somewhere else. We ve camped at Kanoplis Lake and Marion Park and Lake in the past few years. But this time we went to Cedar Valley Reservoir near Garnett, KS. It was a nice place to be, with some wilderness camping areas far from any RV hookups (though right next to a gravel driveway where we could park). Almost as soon as we got out of the car, Jacob found a partially-burned stick left in a fire ring. So of course his hands were black pretty quick. He kept track of that stick the whole time we were there, and used it for everything he could think of. His favorite use, though, was at the lake to splash water: The lake really was his favorite feature. He loved to throw rocks and sticks in it with me, to splash himself, and to stick his feet in. Oh, and to splash me. The pier was also a great thing for him he at first thought it was a boat, then really wanted to go. I made him hold my hand the whole time, and he liked walking on it. But he was frustrated that he couldn t reach the water. Somehow, Jacob acted as if he could sit in the hot sun for hours, just making small splashes with a stick. I, on the other hand, felt the 90-degree heat strongly, and eventually we found a shady spot to play in the lake. Oliver enjoyed crawling around on a blanket or on the grass. Though Terah put a stop to that after she noticed that he came across a pile of fish heads and was about to reach for one and put it in his mouth. We cooked over a campfire Friday night and Saturday morning. It took me a lot longer to start a fire than normal. Part of the problem was that there had been a lot of rain in the area, and it was humid, so there was little kindling to be found. Plenty of larger pieces of wood, so once the fire got going, it burned nicely. We cooked brats, brought along some homemade bread, had grilled foil-wrapped potatoes, and had stir-fry vegetables. Oliver got to eat with us too, of course: Terah is a big believer in smores, so after supper we made some smores Jacob predictably got sticky from the marshmallows and chocolate. Jacob started asking when I d set up the tent almost as soon as he found his stick. All afternoon he kept asking. Finally we got it set up, and of course he was so excited that he played inside it for an hour before he fell asleep. Terah had bought a $4 lantern at Walmart to give to him to use in his tent. I told him that there would be a surprise lantern in his tent for him to use. And he loved his lantern. It could turn on, off, and flash red. At one point he asked me, Dad, do you have a surprise lantern too? No, I will just use my flashlight. He looked a bit sad about that. For about 5 seconds. Then he turned on his lantern again. Here he is with it, still playing happily about 2 hours after his bedtime: And in the morning, of course he was still wanting that, but also wanted to play with his digital camera (a kid s version that also has a simple game or two on it). Without leaving the tent, of course. Oliver was getting hungry while we worked on breakfast, so I gave him some bread to munch on. We used our cast iron skillet to fry some bacon for breakfast. Then Terah made some pancakes in the skillet (with the bacon grease). Greasiest and best pancakes ever. After that, we had some fried and scrambled eggs. After that, we had more smores (I wasn t kidding about Terah being a big believer in them.) Jacob decided that he wanted to play in the other tent. He enjoyed playing with Terah, Oliver, and the air mattress (that Terah appreciated as much as I thought it took up too much space in the car). There s a little window on the back that can open to a screen or open completely. Jacob and Oliver enjoyed looking out of it while open. Or rather, Jacob enjoyed that, while Oliver enjoyed licking it. I had my Droid with me to keep an eye on the weather. The forecast for several days had called for a 20% chance of storms on Saturday. I checked Saturday morning at 7, and it still called for 20% chance of storms after 1PM. We decided we d pack up our tents after breakfast so we could stay as long as we liked or leave on short notice if we preferred. Clouds seemed to be building, though, so I checked the forecast again at maybe 9. Now it called for 60% chance of thunderstorms and heavy rain before 1PM. Guess I shouldn t have been surprised; it is Kansas after all. As I had the first tent about 90% put away, it started to rain. We rushed to get the rest of the stuff in the car, and by the time we did, it was raining heavily. We had planned to spend at least part of the afternoon there, but decided we d look for another place to stop on the way home. We stopped first at Garnett s North Lake, as the rain had let up for awhile. We spotted a fishing pier that Jacob wanted to walk on, but the bridge out to it was underwater, so we passed on that. While Terah fed Oliver in a shelter, Jacob and I played on some swings. Then we walked down to that lake. Jacob carefully came to an abrupt stop and looked both ways at each disused road between us and the lake, saying OK when it was clear to go. The rain picked up again, so we started heading towards home. It got quite heavy, with thunder and everything, which Jacob didn t care for at all. Both boys went to sleep, though. We stopped at Marion Reservoir on the way home. Jacob hadn t been able to play in the lake at Garnett (the place we stopped had a bank that was too steep) and so we played there. He waded into the water at the swimming area, and predictably enjoyed yes throwing rocks into the lake. When we got home, I set out the wet tent and tarps (it s not good to store that stuff wet) to dry there hadn t been rain at home yet. Camping s a lot of work, but it was a good family activity. I m looking forward to our next time, and hope we can choose a weekend a little less hot and damp.

For the second time (First time was in 2008; I didn't join in 2009 as I travelled to Nicaragua on that date), I took part of the World Naked Bike Ride. The WNBR is a global effort, where people in ~150 cities all over the world go cycling nude on the streets of our towns, with varied demands, including:

• Safe conditions for cyclists (mainly aimed at car drivers, at the society at large, but also requesting proper infrastructure measures from our respective governments)
• Raising the consciousness that every individual has a bit of power to free us all from oil-produced pollution
• Tolerance, acceptance of people who are not exactly like us
• Lower the ecologic impact of humans against the world

One of the things I most like about WNBR is its diversity. Not everybody goes for the same reasons. As people who read me often will know, I took part because I believe (and act accordingly!) that the bicycle is the best, most efficient vehicle in by far most of the situations we face day to day, but we need to raise awareness in everybody that the bicycle is just one more vehicle: On one side, we have the right to safely ride on the streets, like any other vehicle. On the other side, we must be responsible, safe drivers, just as we want car drivers to be. Ok, and I will recognize it before anybody complains that I sound too idealistic: I took part of the WNBR because it is _tons_ of fun. This year, we were between 300 and 500 people (depending on whom you ask). Compared to 2008, I felt less tension, more integration, more respect within the group. Of course, it is only natural in the society I live in that most of the participants were men, but the proportion of women really tends to even out. Also, many more people joined fully or partially in the nude (as nudity is not required, it is just an invitation). There was a great display of creativity, people painted with all kinds of interesting phrases and designs, some really beautiful. Oh, one more point, important to me: This is one of the best ways to show that we bikers are not athletes or anything like that. We were people ranging from very thin to quite fat, from very young to quite old. And that is even more striking when we show our whole equipment. If we can all bike around... So can you! Some links, with obvious nudity warnings in case you are offended by looking at innocent butts and similar stuff:

• My WNBR 2010 Mexico photo gallery
• My friend Jes s Wong, professional photographer, was documenting WNBR His gallery
• Media presence (as far as I have seen):
  • El Universal, Saturday 14:30, reporting the Ride had finished and the streets were again... Safe?
  • El Universal, the note printed in the next morning paper: Pedalling nude, they demand respect towards cyclists
  • La Jornada: Cyclist protest
  • La Cr nica: They pedalled bare naked
  • Organizaci n Editorial Mexicana (OEM): Hundreds of cyclists protested nude on Mexico City because of the oil spill Well... not exactly, but close :)
  • Qu ! (Espa a): Around three hundred naked cyclists toured Mexico City
  • rpp.com.pe (Per ): 300 nude cyclists toured the main avenues

As for the sad, stupid note: 19 cyclists were placed under arrest in Morelia, Michoac n because of faltas a la moral (trasgressions against morality), an ill-defined and often abused concept. Also, by far, most of the comments I have read from people on the media, as well a most questions we had by reporters before or after the ride were either why are you going nude (because that's the only way I'll get your attention!) or But many people were not nude! (nudity is not a requirement but only an option.

There has been some discussion on the Debian IPv6 list about how the function gethostbyname() has changed. The manual page says this function is obsolete and with good reason.

A new feature of the function is that if a hostname has both IPv4 and IPv6 entries then the order of the return values is not predefined. In fact it used to be you'd get the IPv4 addresses first, then the IPv6. That has now changed and with the more recent glibc you will get an IPv6 address first. Quite often old code doesn't even check the address family or the size of address structure but just copies the relevant 4 bytes. You then get the first part of an 16-byte IPv6 address wedged into a 4-byte IPv4 address structure which basically means you get a mess.

The fix is pretty simple by changing the system call from gethostbyname() and using getaddrinfo() instead. If you only want the IPv4 addresses, perhaps because other parts of the code have not been checked or changed, then set the hints variable to return only IPv4 addresses.

If one of your packages is starting to play up and unable to connect to certain remote places and is instead trying to get to some "random" address, have a quick check for gethostbyname(). A quick grep across the source code may save a lot of debugging time.

Like you, dear Internet readers, I have no shortage of reading material. I have ready access to more engaging, high quality, informative and relevant information than I can possibly digest. Every day, I have to choose what to read, and what to pass by. This seems like an important thing to do well, and I wonder if I do a good enough job of it. This is just one example of a larger breadth/depth problem, but I m finding the general problem difficult to stomach, so I m focusing on reading for the moment. These are my primary sources of reading material on a day-to-day basis:

• Email I read everything which is addressed to me personally. I don t reply to all of it, and my reply time can vary greatly, but I am able to keep up with reading it, and I consider it important to do so. I am still subscribed to a selection of mailing lists, but I find them increasingly awkward to manage. There are a few which I scan on a daily basis, but most of them I process in batches when I m offline and traveling. I m subscribed to far fewer mailing lists than I was five years ago, though I feel they are still the most effective online discussion facility available. I find myself doing more and more discussing in real-time on IRC and by phone rather than by email.
• Blogs I subscribe to a few big aggregators and a random sampling of individual blogs. Most of them I scan rather than read. I do most of this offline, while in transit, and so I don t tend to follow links unless they re promising enough to save for later. I ve recently stopped trying to keep up (scan every post) on most of them, and instead just sample whatever is current at the time. It feels like turning on a television, flipping through all of the channels, and turning it off again. Even when I do find something which I feel is worth reading, it s hard for me to focus my attention after a long session of scanning. I do find a lot of good stuff this way, but I m pretty dissatisfied with the overall experience. I never feel like I m looking in the right places.
• Shared links I share my own links publicly, and follow those shared by friends and acquaintances. I do this with multiple groups of people who don t connect directly, and pass items back and forth between those groups. I place an increasingly high priority on reading items which are shared by people I know, more than on trying to follow the original sources, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so good: my personal network acts as a pretty good filter for what will interest me. I have the nagging feeling that I need to maintain a balance here, though. If I read mostly what other people are sending me, I feel like I m living in a bubble of like-minded people and fear that I ll lose perspective.
• News I read hardly any proper news. I don t subscribe to any newspapers, and generally don t read the online versions either. I do read articles which are shared by people in my network. Traditional media never seems to have the right scope for me. There may be particular journalists, or particular topics I d like to follow, but news outlets simply don t group their content in a way which fits my mind.
• Books Remember these? My diet of books has shrunk drastically since I started reading more online media. Devoting my full attention to a book just doesn t feel as energizing as it used to. I hesitate at the prospect of sinking so many hours into a book, only to decide that it wasn t worthwhile, or worse, to forget what I learned as I m bombarded by bite-sized, digestible tidbits from the Internet. I feel sad about losing the joy of reading I once had, and want to find a way to reintegrate books into my regular diet.

How do you decide what to read, and what not to read? How does your experience differ between your primary information sources? How have you tried to improve?

I finally got punished today for using unstable without knowing enough about my system. Since I can't access my emails I'm hoping for help from planet-debian. Please excuse...

So the last words of my machine:

Loading, please wait...
  One or more specified logical volume(s) not found.
Unable to find LVM volume mylvm/root_crypt
  One or more specified logical volume(s) not found.
Unable to find LVM volume mylvm/swap_crypt
File descriptor 3 (/conf/conf.d/cryptroot) leaked on lvm invocation. Parent PID 
352: /bin/sh
udevd-work[77]: kernel-provided name 'dm-0' and NAME= 'mapper/mylvm-swap' 
disagree, please use SYMLINK+= or change the kernel to provide the proper name

<blink>_</blink>

Please, if you can help me, write a comment to this blogpost!
(Thank you, Hanno for borrowing me your laptop!)

update: It wasn't udev (this time). Sorry. The problem was, that I updated libdevmapper without also updating dmsetup. I could boot into an older kernel and solve this. A Bug against the LVM Debian package is already filled.

Seth Berkley gave an interesting TED talk about developing vaccines against the HIV and Influenza viruses [1]. The part I found most interesting was the description of how vaccines against viruses are currently developed using eggs and how they plan to use bacteria instead for faster and cheaper production. One of the problems with using eggs is that if the chickens catch the disease and die then you can t make a vaccine. Aigars Mahinovs wrote a really good review of Microsoft Azure and compared it to Amazon EC2 [2]. It didn t surprise me that Azure compared poorly to the competition. Johanna Blakley gave an insightful TED talk about IP lessons from the fashion industry [3]. She explained how an entire lack of IP protection other than trademark law was an essential part of the success of the fashion industry. She also compared the profits in various industries and showed that industries with little or no IP protection involve vastly larger amounts of money than industries with strong IP protection. Lisa D wrote an insightful post about whether Autism Spectrum Disorders (such as Asperger Syndrome) should be considered to be disabilities [4]. I don t entirely agree with her, but she makes some really good points. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy gave an interesting TED talk about the way the Taliban train young children to become suicide bombers [5]. Apparently the Taliban prey on large poor families, sometimes paying the parents for taking children away to school . At the Taliban schools the children are beaten, treated poorly, and taught theology by liars who will say whatever it takes to get a result. Then after being brain-washed they are sent out to die. Wired has an interesting article about Charles Komanoff s research into New York traffic problems [6]. He aims to track all the economic externalities of traffic patterns and determine incentives to encourage people to do things that impose less costs on the general economy. His suggestions include making all bus travel free as the externality of the time spent collecting fares is greater than the fare revenue. It s a really interesting article, his research methods should be implemented when analysing traffic in all large cities, and many of his solutions can be implemented right now without further analysis such as free buses and variable ticket pricing according to the time of day. William Li gave an interesting TED talk about starving cancer by preventing new blood vessels from growing to feed it [7]. Drugs to do this have been shown to increase the life expectancy of cancer patients by more than 100% on average. Also autopsies of people who died in car accidents show that half the women in their 40 s had breast cancer and half the men in their 50 s prostate cancer but those cancers didn t grow due to a natural lack of blood supply, so the aim here is to merely promote what naturally happens in terms of regulating cancers and preventing them from growing larger than 0.5mm^3. There are a number of foods that prevent blood vessels growing to cancers which includes dark chocolate! ;) Also drugs which prevent blood vessel growth also prevent obesity, I always thought that eating chocolate all the time prevented me from getting fat due to the central nervous system stimulants that kept me active Graham Hill gave an inspiring TED talk about becoming a weekday vegetarian [8]. Instead of making a commitment to being always vegetarian he s just mostly vegetarian (only eating meat on Sundays). He saves most of the environmental cost and doesn t feel guilty if he ever misses a day. It s an interesting concept. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for the Guardian about the phrase Information Wants To Be Free [9]. He points out that really it s people who want to be free from the tyranny that is being imposed on us in the name of anti-piracy measures. He also points out that it s a useful straw-man for the MAFIAA to use when claiming that we are all pirates. The Atlantic has an interesting article about the way that Google is working to save journalistic news [10]. Adam Sadowsky gave an interesting TED talk about creating a Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video This Too Shall Pass [11]. At the end of the talk they include a 640*480 resolution copy of the music video. Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk advocating increased government spending on scientific research [12]. Among other things he pointed out that the best research indicates that the amount of money the US government invested in the Apollo program was returned 14* to the US economy due to exports of new American products that were based on that research. It s surprising that any justification other than the return on investment for the Apollo program is needed! Moot gave an interesting TED talk about Anonymity [13]. I don t think that he made a good case for anonymity, he cited one person being identified and arrested for animal cruelty due to the efforts of 4chan people and also the campaign against the Cult of Scientology (which has not been very successful so far). Rory Sutherland gave an intriguing TED talk titled Sweat the Small Stuff [14]. He describes how small cheap changes can often provide greater benefits than huge expensive changes and advocates corporations having a Chief Detail Officer to take charge of identifying and implementing such changes. TED Hosted an interesting debate between pro and anti nuclear campaigners [15]. They agreed that global warming is a significant imminent problem but disagree on what methods should be implemented to solve it.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_berkley_hiv_and_flu_the_vaccine_strategy.html
• [2] http://www.aigarius.com/blog/2010/05/19/so-what-is-microsoft-azure-and-how-it-compares-to-amazons-aws/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html
• [4] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/80330.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/sharmeen_obaid_chinoy_inside_a_school_for_suicide_bombers.html
• [6] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_komanoff_traffic/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
• [9] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/18/information-wants-to-be-free
• [10] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/04/how-to-save-the-news/8095/
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_sadowsky_engineers_a_viral_music_video.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_sweat_the_small_stuff.html
• [15] http://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html

Our co-op has joined Book Industry Communication as an associate member, mainly in order to voice experiences of the Koha community and ourselves about RFID tag standardisation and related sustainable development. I want us to give the Free and Open Source Software library world and our charity and academic clients more input in developing this big change to libraries. Even so, it wasn t an easy decision to join. I still believe that RFID standards development would be better done in an open forum, but there doesn t seem to be a perfect choice and I don t think we can create one. BIC already has cross-sector support and seems much more open than the so-called RFID Alliance . Pragmatism was enough, this time, and so far BIC seems friendly and welcoming. I see that a larger service provider co-operative, OCLC (UK), is also a member, so hopefully that means it s safe for co-ops. I think most of the readers of this will be free software developers, koha users and/or members of other co-ops. So, I ask you, what do you think of this move? Leave me a comment on our blog or email me if you prefer to keep it private.

Well, it s been some time since I last wrote here and things are quite hectic, due to some real-life happenings. Announcement For those people that are insterested in a small PDF viewer, based on an actively maintained backend, and that doesn t bring your computer to a halt when you try to zoom your documents when you need to see some details, then you might want to give this version of xpdf a try. I already received some reports for some bugs and fixed them, with one of them being a problem related by a kind user of Gentoo. Motivation Some people have asked me why this even needs to exist in the first place and I agree that it would be better if it didn t: I would love to spend my time actually using my computers rather than fixing my computers for better tasks (read: studying Mathematics, etc). The upstream maintainer of xpdf uses it as one source of income and keeps it running across many system (even legacy ones). I imagine that this one of the reasons why he tries to keep xpdf almost self contained, with many parts that could be delegated to other libraries, and with some abstraction code that makes the code compile even in the presence of very broken compilers. Of course, this means, in part, that as long as you take more duties, maintaing the code becomes more and more complex. He told me that he doesn t offer an open development tree because he wants to give his customers some advantages over the public version and his reasons are perfectly justifiable, of course. He also manifested the interest of possibly basing xpdf on a more modern toolkit and, when I asked him what that would be, he mentioned that, perhaps, it would be Qt. The development of xpdf will, quite probably, take newer directions. Unfortunately, xpdf has not seen a new upstream release since 2007-02-27. It did, though, have some patchlevel updates released. Taking care of the maintainance of the code is a high concern for distributions. Some people, though, would like to keep it simple (me included). Unfortunately, some efforts to maintain it had not had the necessary coordination and duplication of effort has occured. Proposal I am willing to become a patch aggregator for the code in xpdf with a poppler backend. I would love to give it some refactoring too, drop some of the legacy code that is not used (and only serves to make the code hard to read), and adopt some good coding style standard (I particularly like the one from the Linux Kernel with the proper adaptations for C++). I have already contacted the people at Gentoo, and I would love to get people from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Suse involved also. Alas, the last time I tried to mail their mailing lists, I got messages telling me that my messages were rejected or waiting for moderation, because I was not a subscriber. I never heard back, since. I appreciate it if you could help spread the word. Thanks.

In an business open source conference held today (June 10th) in Tel Aviv, Michael Eitan, Minister of Improvement of Government Services, said that projects under his responsibility will go open source to improve transparency. More info at TheMarker (in Hebrew, English version by Google translate). A pilot with a focus group should begin soon for testing the changes.
Filed under: Israeli Community

One practice that seems relatively common is for an organisation to have two main mailing lists, one for serious discussions that are expected to be relatively topical and another for anything that s not overly offensive. Humans are inherently incapable of avoiding social chatter when doing serious work. The people who don t want certain social interactions with their colleagues can find it annoying to have both social and serious discussions on the same list. While the people who want social discussions get annoyed when people ask them to keep discussions on topic. Organisations that I have been involved with have had mailing lists such as foo-chat and foo-talk for social discussions that involve the same people as the main list named foo , as well as having list names such as memo-list for random discussions that are separate from a large collection of lists which demand on-topic messages. The Debian project has some similar issues with the debian-private mailing list which is virtually required reading for Debian Developers. One complication that Debian has is that the debian-private list has certain privacy requirements (messages will be declassified after 3 years unless the author requests that they remain secret forever) which make it more difficult to migrate a discussion. You can t just migrate a discussion from a private list to a public list without leaking some information. So it seems to me that the best solution might be to have a list named debian-private-chat which has the same secrecy requirements but which is not required reading. As debates about what discussions are suitable for debian-private have been going on for more than 3 years I don t think there s any reason not to publish the fact that such discussions take place. Also it seems that every organisation of moderate scale that has a similar use of email and for which members socialise with each other could benefit from a similar mailing list structure. Note that I use a broad definition of the word socialise there s a lot of people who will never meet in person and a lot of the discussions are vaguely related to the main topic. I wonder whether it might be considered to be a best practice to automatically create a chat list at the same time as creating a serious discussion list.

This last weeks, I've worked on implementing the Desktop Notification Specification into Emacs. It allows sending desktop notification in a very simple way.

(notifications-notify
    :title "You've got mail!"
    :body "There's 34 mails unread"
    :app-icon "~/.emacs.d/icons/mail.png"
    :urgency 'low)

It supports the protocol signals (NotificationClosed and ActionInvoked) and the two main methods (Notify and CloseNotification). The methods specification are implemented entirely (hints, replaces, actions, icon, etc). The signals are supported via callbacks function provided on the notification creation. It have been merged into Emacs trunk today.

2010-06-09  Julien Danjou  <julien@danjou.info>
        * net/notifications.el: New file.

This also allowed me to discover, raise and fix a bug in the D-Bus binding of Emacs, which will be probably fixed in trunk soon.

A somewhat na ve young man, a kidnapping, a policeman's daughter, a night club singer, said policeman's partner being involved, a love triangle, a pervert and (probably because it's Lynch) a cut off ear. What more do you need ... ? Or, in other words, I absolutely regret not having seen Blue Velvet before. In contrast, Pink Flamingos takes its fight over the title of the filthiest woman alive (which sets the whole plot in motion) a bit too literal for my taste. I like movies that leave more things up to the imagination of the spectator. Or perhaps it's just that my sense of aesthetics doesn't agree with John Water's. (And to the person who knew nothing bettter to say than You idiot to my negative critique about Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: I don't delete comments on my blog that don't agree with me. But I do not tolerate personal attacks. Post it to your own blog. You're as entitled to your opinion as I am.)